If he can make it there . . .
How a kid who thought he wanted to be a sportswriter wound up running his favorite team in New York, New York. Plus, did the Cards sign too many old pitchers?
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TOP OF THE FIRST
On the hill but over the hill?
The Cardinals have bolstered their starting rotation by signing three uh . . . experienced free agents. Did they set themselves up for failure by adding too many old guys?
The Cardinals, hoping to reload instead of rebuild after finishing with a disappointing 71-91 record, entered the off-season with a lot of needs to address.
The offense scored 719 runs (19th best in MLB) and compiled a .742 OPS (13th).
The Cardinals were even worse when it came to run prevention, tied with the Rockies for last in defensive efficiency (.670) and ranked 20th in defensive runs saved (minus-7)
St. Louis starting pitchers compiled a 5.07 ERA in 2023, which ranked 26th among MLB staffs. The bullpen was no gem either, with a 4.47 ERA, which ranked 24th.
But starting pitching was the most glaring weakness, and the Cardinals addressed it quickly as free agency got underway. They signed Kyle Gibson, Lance Lynn, and Sonny Gray.
No spring chickens
Lynn and Gibson will be 36 on opening day. Gray will be 34.
Only Gray’s deal is guaranteed for multiyears. He landed a three-year deal for a reported $75 million with a club option for the 2027 season. The Cardinals reportedly outbid the Reds and Royals to sign Gray, who was 8-8 with a 2.79 ERA for the Twins in 2023.
Lynn, who went 7-2 with a 4.36 ERA for the Dodgers after the White Sox traded him in August, signed for one season for $10 million with a club option in 2025.
Gibson, who went 15-9 with a 4.73 ERA in 33 starts with the Orioles, signed for a year at a reported $12 million with a club option in 2025.
Did the Cardinals help themselves with these three veterans? Or did they just spend nearly $100 million without really solving the problem?
I think the moves were solid.
Here are a couple of things to keep in mind. The first thing is pitchers, particularly starting pitchers, age much better than hitters these days.
Look at how many pitchers over 30 were among the pitching WAR leaders.
Here are the top 33 pitchers last season ranked by baseball Wins Above Replacement
2023 2024 age
Rk Player WAR opening day
1 Gerrit Cole 7.5 33
2 Blake Snell 6.0 31
3 Logan Webb 5.6 27
4 Sonny Gray 5.4 34
5 Kyle Bradish 4.9 27
6 Kodai Senga 4.5 31
7 Zac Gallen 4.4 28
8 Zack Wheeler 4.2 33
9 Jordan Montgomery 4.1 32
10 Jesus Luzardo 4.0 26
10 Shohei Ohtani 4.0 29
12 George Kirby 3.9 26
12 Merrill Kelly 3.9 35
14 Braxton Garrett 3.8 26
14 Justin Steele 3.8 28
16 Clayton Kershaw 3.7 36
17 Tanner Scott 3.6 29
17 Corbin Burnes 3.6 29
17 Tanner Bibee 3.6 25
20 Zach Eflin 3.5 29
20 Justin Verlander 3.5 41
20 Eduardo Rodriguez 3.5 30
23 Kevin Gausman 3.4 33
23 Sandy Alcantara 3.4 28
23 Spencer Strider 3.4 25
23 Luis Castillo 3.4 31
27 Pablo Lopez 3.3 28
27 Mike Clevinger 3.3 33
27 Michael King 3.3 28
30 Max Scherzer 3.2 39
30 Chris Martin 3.2 37
30 Josiah Gray 3.2 26
30 Charlie Morton 3.2 40
Enos Sarris did an excellent rundown of this trend a couple of years ago for The Athletic. It boils down to this: Off-speed pitches have become more important tools than just velocity for starting pitchers. So even as their velocity drops, starting pitchers remain effective, and their strikeout rates remain high.
The aging process is much kinder for starting pitchers today than it was a decade ago when Bill Petti looked at the topic for FanGraphs in 2013.
Secondly, pitchers traditionally take a little longer than hitters to get to the big leagues. That seems to have only increased in recent years.
A player has to accrue six years of service before becoming a free agent. If you want to overhaul your starting rotation in one off-season, you are likely going to have to sign pitchers who are over 30. There just aren’t many pitchers who become free agents before that age.
Injury problems
Whether position players or pitchers, injuries are always a greater concern as players age.
Look at the Dodgers’ Clayton Kershaw, who was in his age 35 season in 2023. He went 13-5 with a 2.46 ERA, so he was quite effective when he pitched. But he missed about five weeks with shoulder problems.
On the other hand, some of the Dodgers’ younger pitchers missed even more time. Walker Buehler, the heir apparent to Kershaw as the Dodgers’ ace, underwent Tommy John surgery in August 2022 and didn’t make it back to the majors last season.
Tony Gonsolin, an All-Star in 2022, underwent Tommy John surgery last summer and is expected to miss all of 2024.
Dustin May underwent surgery last summer, and General Manager Brandon Gomes said May might pitch for the Dodgers at some point in 2024.
Two-way star Shohei Ohtani, who the Dodgers recently signed to a 10-year, $700 million contract, should fit right in. He had Tommy John surgery in 2023 and is unlikely to pitch — though Ohtani will still be able to bat — in 2024.
HEART OF THE ORDER
Dream come true
New York is a tough town, and David Stearns knows what he’s getting into as head of baseball operations for the Mets. But this is his dream job.
I took the kid to lunch the day he broke the news to me. He was on winter break from Havard and was in Arizona to see his father.
Whenever he was in town, we’d try to get together for lunch near my office. His dad lived up in Carefree. So it was a little bit of a haul to downtown Mesa, where I was the business editor of the East Valley Tribune.
The kid spent the previous summer as an intern for Brooklyn Cyclones, the Mets’ entry in the New York–Penn League, a short-season A league.
He enjoyed it so much that he no longer wanted to be a sports writer. Now he wanted to work in baseball.
I won’t lie. I was disappointed, but I understood.
It was 2005, and the newspaper industry was showing signs of cratering.
I assumed by working in baseball he meant doing something in a major league front office. Surely he wasn’t thinking about spending a career coming with goofy in-game promotions — say a cow-milking contest — that are the stock and trade of minor league baseball teams.
This was not long after Theo Epstein, serving as Boston GM, had helped the Red Sox break the curse and win a World Series for the first time since 1918.
“So you want to be the next Theo Epstein?” I asked.
“That’s the idea,’’ David Stearns said and smiled.
The next Theo?
Now Stearns gets his chance as president of baseball operations with the Mets.
There are some parallels with Stearns and Epstein. Epstein grew up in Brookline, Mass., a mile from the Red Sox’s Fenway Park. Stearns grew up in Manhattan, a passionate Mets fan.
Both went to Ivy League schools, Epstein to Yale, Stearns to Harvard. Both started college hoping to become sports writers and worked for their college newspapers. But each found a higher calling as a baseball executive.
When Epstein became GM of the Red Sox in 2002, the team had gone 84 years since last winning a World Series. The Mets are not nearly that bad, but it has been a while, 37 years, since they last won a Series.
Both became GMs at an early age. Epstein was 28 when he took the reigns in Boston, and Stearns was 30 when the Brewers hired him.
One big difference: Stearns is taking his dream job after establishing a track record.
He was the Brewers general manager and then president of baseball operations for seven seasons. They went to the playoffs four times during his time at the helm.
Drawbacks of the Mets’ job
Has there ever been a worse-kept secret in baseball than that the Mets were going to hire Stearns as head of baseball operations at the end of the 2023 season?
Brewers owner Mark Attanasio kept Stearns from talking to the Mets at the end of the 2021 season when the Mets were looking to fill a position for general manager and a position to head baseball operations. The Mets kept the position of head of baseball operations open, and Attanasio made Stearns a consultant for the first year of his deal with the Brewers.
At the time, I wrote that Stearns shouldn’t take the Mets job for several reasons. Chief among them was the idea of working with a GM who was hired by someone else might prove difficult and former Mets GM Sandy Alderson’s presence with the team would certainly prove difficult.
Alderson was serving as president, but he stepped down in February.
Former Angels GM Billy Eppler was hired to fill the GM position and did the job through the 2023 season. Stearns and Eppler had talked and told the media they wouldn’t have any trouble working together.
And they didn’t.
Three days after Stearns’ hiring was announced, Eppler resigned. Eppler is the subject of an MLB investigation into his possible use of a phantom injured list that allowed the Mets to keep players in reserve who were healthy enough to play.
He’s one of them
So the job is better than it was in the summer of 2022. But there are still a few challenges for Stearns.
Owner Steve Cohen, a hedge fund billionaire, seems to be quite involved. When Stearns went to Japan to speak with free agent pitcher Yoshinobu Yamamoto and his family, Cohen went, too.
Cohen is willing to spend money. The Mets entered the 2023 season with a payroll of around $340 million, tops in MLB. But that money was not well spent.
By midseason, the Mets were tearing down their roster on the way to a 75-87 record. The consensus is the Mets are unlikely to contend in 2024.
When Cohen bought the team in September 2020, he said he expected to win a championship in three to five years. That fifth year will be 2025.
On top of a demanding owner, the Mets have a demanding fan base, egged on by a demanding media.
“I understand them,’’ Stearns said of Mets fans in an interview on MLB.TV. “I’m one of them.”
David’s journey
David came to my attention one day in 2001 when my wife called me. “You are going to be getting a call from a David Stearns,’’ she said. She explained that he was a high school kid who was interested in journalism and wanted to gain some hands-on experience this summer.
He lived in New York. His parents were divorced, and he was spending the summer in Arizona with his dad. He called the paper asking if there were any internship opportunities for a high school kid, and his call was routed to her. Christia was the deputy metro editor at the time.
David said he was interested in sports. So she put him in contact with me.
He was out here on spring break. I arranged to have him come in, and we talked about what he might do.
He was dressed nicely, in slacks and a polo shirt, and he seemed quite mature for a 16-year-old. He enjoyed sports in general, but the Mets and baseball in particular. And he had a passion for Pepsi; he even included the soft drink in his email address.
He gave me a link to his school’s online newspaper. And he agreed to the compensation we were offering — none.
I gave him some assigned reading to complete by the time he came back in June. “Ball Four” was one of the books.
During that summer he would come to the office once a week. and I’d give him tasks, inputting contact information into the computer system and doing some filing.
Eventually, I felt confident in his abilities to do a couple of feature stories — the one I remember was a guy who made furniture out of broken bats — and to cover the Connie Mack regional tournament.
He went back to New York and that September I moved over to the business desk.
David was willing to spend another summer working without pay, but the guys in the sports department were unwilling to come up with things for him to do. And he wasn’t interested in business reporting.
Staying in touch
When I moved to the business desk, I was of much less use to David or any kid who wanted to get into sports journalism. I still had some contacts, but I was leaving that part of the business.
And when David decided he wanted to pursue the MLB avenue, I was of no value.
He could have dropped me like a bad habit.1 But he stayed in touch.
As I mentioned we got together for lunch. We emailed occasionally. I took him to a spring training game once.
I met up with him a couple of times at games when he was with the Brewers, once in Maryvale and once in Milwaukee.
Late last season, as it became obvious that David was going to the Mets, I left a message with him congratulating him on landing the job.
He called me back right after it became official.
“My whole family is really excited,’’ he said. “And I’m really excited.”
And I am excited for him.
SHORT HOPS
Give this guy a bat
Veteran pitcher Daniel Hudson has shown a knack for driving in runs
Daniel Hudson’s career as an MLB pitcher may be over after 14 years.
After recovering from a knee injury in June 2022, Hudson made his way back. But he reinjured his knee in August after three appearances.
But he has decided to give it one more shot. He agreed a minor-league deal with the Dodgers on Dec. 13.
Maybe the Dodgers should use him as a pinch hitter. Sure he hasn’t had a plate appearance since 2018, and he’s a career .222 hitter with one homer. But when it comes to driving in runs, “Huddy” is Mr. Clutch.
In his career, Hudson has come to bat with 102 runners on base. He’s driven in 21, that’s 19.61 percent.
That’s good. How good?
Better than Juan Gonzalez, or Manny Ramirez, or Barry Bonds, or Mike Trout.
According to Baseball Musings’ RBI percentage calculator, of players since the beginning of the 1974 season who have come to bat with 100 or more runners on base during their career, Hudson has driven in a higher percentage of runners than all but five.
Royce Lewis is the leader with 21.62 percent.
Among those with 1,000 or more chances, the leader is Dante Bichette, who drove in 1,141 of the 4,565 runners on when he batted in his career. That’s 18.99 percent.
Gonzalez is second with 18.52 percent.
How difficult is it to develop two-way players?
Reggie Crawford hit .295 with 13 homers for UConn in his senior season. He pitched a little, appearing in six games and going 7 2/3 innings with a 2.50 ERA. But MLB teams thought he had more potential as a pitcher.
The Giants took him in the first round in 2022. They are letting him try both.
He pitched in 13 games for two Giants’ minor league teams in 2023 and compiled a 2.84 ERA. He hit .235 in 18 at-bats.
That’s not many at-bats. So the Giants decided to give him some more in the Arizona Fall League, using him mostly as a DH and not pitching him.
In 71 plate appearances with the Scottsdale Scorpions, Crawford had a slash line of .138/.282/.276 with two homers.
He seems much further along with the pitching side of it. And that’s the rub. For players to get a chance to be the next Shohei Ohtani — they need to be ready for prime time with both skill sets at about the same time.